It was first developed by Elizabeth Loftus and her undergraduate student Jim Coan, as support for the thesis that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people.
Unknown to the participants, one of the narratives was false; it described Coan's brother getting lost in a shopping mall at around the age of 5, then being rescued by an elderly person and reunited with his family.
Coan later refined the study methodology for his senior thesis where he reports "all subjects were able to identify the false memory".
[3] In a follow-up experiment, Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell adapted the methods Coan had used on his brother in a formal study with 24 participants, about 25% of whom reported remembering the false event.
An article in the journal Child Development by Pezdek and Hodges described an extension of the experiment: by using the subjects' family members to do the interviewing, their study was able to replicate Loftus's findings that memories of being lost in the mall could be created and were more likely to occur in young children.
[7] Loftus responded to their criticism, noting "exaggerations, omissions and errors" in Crook and Dean's description of the technique and mistakes about the study's representation in the media.
Loftus also accused Crook of writing the article as part of a long series of efforts to discredit her integrity as a researcher and her work.
Because family members who claimed to witness the event corroborated the false memories in the Lost in the Mall study, Blizard and Shaw argue that the results are not applicable to potential suggestion in therapeutic practice.